This past week, I spent two days in Tiburon supporting my former colleague and bootcamper, Dana Reynolds, who was facilitating the Code for America staff retreat. Any time spent with the good folks at Code for America is going to be inspiring time, and I couldn’t help expressing this sentiment on Twitter after the retreat was over:

Got to spend the past two days with the @codeforamerica staff. They are extraordinary people doing amazing, important work. Inspired.

I didn’t know Jang, so I glanced at his Twitter profile, and I saw that my friends, June Kim and SeungBum Kim, followed him. That was a good sign, so I responded, resulting in the following exchange, each message less than 140 characters:

I was planning to send an email to some folks at Code for America to follow up, but it wasn’t necessary. Conversations on Twitter happen out in the open, and Cyd Harrell, Code for America’s UX evangelist, saw the thread and responded. This is what happened:

@Ejang very cool!! You should talk to @cbracy and Lynn Fine – great to see what's going on in South Korea! /@eekim

I don’t know what’s going to emerge from this whole interaction, but something good will. At worst:

I learned something new about an issue I care about in a country I care about

I made some new connections

I facilitated some new connections

I strengthened some old connections

All from simply tweeting how I was feeling one evening.

This is what can happen when you have ways to communicate with lots of people transparently and with very little friction. But it’s also critical to recognize what underlies the technology that makes this sort of thing possible: people, trust, relationships, and literacy.